There is a little article in Vol 18:10 of CRM (1995) on spring house
cleaning.
 
Some nineteenth century housekeeping books offer great information about
spring cleaning. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping ([1880] ed.
Estelle W. Wilcox) reprinted by the Minnesota Historical Society in 1988
goes into great detail on the subject. The cleaning described required
the help of "one stout girl at the least." The first week is spent
indoctrinating the "stout girl" into your ways, baking lots of food,
buying disinfectants, reorganizing all drawers and washing clothing
while you "have 'the boys' cleaning the yard of the winter rubbish and
debris." The next week the real work begins: "take a man and go to the
cellar; first have everything taken out that does not belong there. . ."
The process of removing everything from a room, cleaning, disinfecting,
and renovating moves next to the garret and then through the rest of the
house. I imagine that a lot of unneccesary stuff was discarded in this
frame of mind and process.
 
I wonder if climate affects this process. During a cold, snowy,
Minnesota winter a fair amount of rubbish seems to collect on porches,
in yards etc. that then needs to be sorted through and disposed of when
it thaws. As the author of Buckeye Cookery notes: "When mother earth
summons the stirring winds to help clear away the dead leaves and winter
litter for the comming grass and flowers, every housekeeper has a
feeling of sympathy and begins to talk of house cleaning." In
California, where spring is (I imagine) less dramatic, is the spring
cleaning impulse as intense?
 
Men seem to be affected by these impulses as well, but less
regularly--every 50 years or so. Working on farmsteads in Minnesota, I
have twice found massive deposits of nails, old tools, broken implement
parts, and other junk that must be the result of "barn cleaning."
 
Sigrid Arnott
Historical Archaeologist
Minnesota Historical Society
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> ----------
> From:         Grace H. Ziesing[SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent:         Monday, October 05, 1998 4:28 PM
> To:   [log in to unmask]
> Subject:      Cleaning House
>
> My colleagues and I at the Anthropological Studies Center and Foothill
> Resources are in the process of writing an "Interpretive Report" for a
> project we did near Union Station in downtown Los Angeles a couple
> years
> ago. The volume is intended to go beyond the standard data-recovery
> type of
> report by offering our interpretations of the fieldwork and laboratory
> analyses. We would like this to be useful to professionals and
> interested
> lay readers alike, and, to that end, are compiling a collection of
> short,
> focused, and well-illustrated essays on various topics relating to the
> research questions we originally posed.
>
> One of the topics is called "Cleaning House" and is an attempt to
> explain
> how the pits, privies, and wells we all so love to find got filled
> with
> household refuse in the first place. The kinds of deposits we've been
> finding seem to be the result of more than just everyday garbage
> disposal;
> they appear to represent something more along the lines of episodic
> housecleaning or the result of periodic household transitions.
>
> Does anyone have any thoughts on this? We'd love to incorporate the
> ideas
> and observations of our archaeological brethren. Tell us about your
> hollow
> features, what you found in them, and how you interpreted them.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Mary Praetzellis and Julia Costello
>